Grayson Perry (born 1960) is an
English artist, known
mainly for his
ceramic vases and
cross-dressing. He works in several
media. Perry's
vases have classical forms and
are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with
their attractive appearance, e.g.,
child
abuse and
sado-masochism. There
is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images
of Perry as "Claire", his female
alter-ego, often appear. He was awarded the
Turner Prize in 2003 for his ceramics,
receiving the prize dressed as Claire.
Life
Perry was born in
Chelmsford
on 24 March 1960. When he was seven, his father
left the family because of his mother's adultery. Perry describes
his father's departure as the event that had the largest impact on
him in his life.
He subsequently lived at Bicknacre
, Essex, with his mother, his stepfather, a younger
sister and two stepbrothers and attended Woodham Ferrers
Church of England School.
In his childhood Perry took an interest in drawing and building
model aeroplanes, both of which were to become themes in his work.
To escape from a difficult family situation and his stepfather's
violence, he retreated to his bedroom or his father’s shed where he
became absorbed in a fantasy life, sometimes involving a
teddy bear that had become a “surrogate father
figure”.
He was
educated at King Edward VI Grammar School
. Perry took interest in conventional boys'
activities, such as model airplanes, motorcycles and girls. He was
in the school's
Combined Cadet Corps and
wanted to train as an army officer. He was involved in the
Chelmsford
punk scene in the late
1970s.
At the same time he had unconventional sexual desires and
fantasies. He describes his first sexual experience at the age of
seven when he tied himself up in his pyjamas. From an early age he
liked to dress in women's clothes and in his teens realized that he
was a transvestite. At the age of 15 he moved in with his father's
family at Chelmsford, where he began to go out dressed as a woman.
When he was discovered by his father he said he would stop, but his
stepmother told everyone about it and a few months later threw him
out.
He
returned to his mother and stepfather at Great Bardfield
.
At this time he decided not to join the army and, following the
encouragement of his art teacher, decided to study art. He did an
art foundation course at Braintree College of Further Education
from 1978 to 1979. He studied for a BA in
fine
art at
Portsmouth
Polytechnic, graduating in 1982.
He had an interest in
film and exhibited his first piece of pottery at the "New
Contemporaries" show at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts
in 1980. In the months following his
graduation he joined the "Neo-Naturists", a group started by
Christine Binnie to revive the
"true sixties spirit – which involves living one’s life more or
less naked and occasionally manifesting it into a performance for
which the main theme is body paint”. (Dawson, p. 81) They put
on events at galleries and other venues.
When he went to Portsmouth in 1979, his stepfather told him not to
return home. Perry has been estranged from his mother since 1990.
After
graduating he lived a hand-to-mouth existence in squats, at one point sharing a house with milliner
Stephen Jones and pop
musician Boy George; the three of them
competing to see who could wear the most outrageous outfits to
Blitz, a New Romantic
nightclub based in Covent Garden, London
.
Perry started pottery lessons in September 1983 at the Central
Institute where he was taught by Sarah Sanderson. His first
exhibition of ceramics was in London in December 1983. He began to
develop images and text that represented his experience in terms of
“explicit scenes of sexual perversion – sadomasochism, bondage,
transvestism”. For a while he made glazed plates with text as he
could not make anything else. He was never motivated by a desire to
work in clay as such, rather he chose pottery because studio
ceramics was in “thrall to a formal idea”. Film having proved an
inadequate medium for communicating his ideas about gender and
society, Perry found in pottery an effective alternative because of
“the ways artifice could be deployed to make the innocent or honest
pot have a purpose and mean something”.
The
Stedelijk
Museum
in Amsterdam mounted a large solo exhibition of his
work in 2002. It was partly for this work that he was
awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, the first time it was given to a
ceramic artist. He attended the award ceremony dressed as a girl,
his alter-ego Claire.
In 2005 Perry featured in a documentary produced by
Twofour for
Channel 4,
Why Men Wear Frocks in which he examined transvestism and
masculinity at the start of the 21st century. Perry talked about
his own life as a transvestite and the effect it had on him and his
family, frankly discussing its difficulties and pleasures. The
documentary won a
Royal
Television Society award for best network production.
An autobiographical account of his formative years,
Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Girl (co-written with Wendy Jones), was
published in 2006. He was an arts correspondent for
The Times until October 2007
[35899].
He moved to Gloucester in 2007.
In 2007, Perry made the following comments on self-censorship in
The Times: “The reason I haven’t
gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real
fear that someone will slit my throat” (
Jihadist violence cows "fearless" artists into
silence), a reference to
Theo van Gogh.
Work
Perry's work refers to several ceramic traditions, including
Greek pottery and
folk art. He has said, “I like the whole
iconography of pottery. It hasn't got any big
pretensions to being great public works of art, and no matter how
brash a statement I make, on a pot it will always have certain
humility ... [F]or me the shape has to be classical invisible: then
you’ve got a base that people can understand”. His vessels are made
by coiling, a traditional method. Most have a complex surface
employing many techniques, including “glazing, incision, embossing,
and the use of photographic transfers", which requires several
firings. To some he adds sprigs, little relief sculptures stuck to
the surface. The high degree of skill required by his ceramics and
their complexity distances them from craft pottery. It has been
said that these methods are not used for decorative effect but to
give meaning. Perry challenges the idea, implicit in the craft
tradition, that pottery is merely decorative or utilitarian and
cannot express ideas.
In his work Perry reflects upon his upbringing as a boy, his
stepfather's anger and the absence of proper guidance about male
conduct. Perry's understanding of the roles in his family is
portrayed in
Using My Family,1998, where a teddy bear
provides affection, and
The Guardians,1998, which depicts
his mother and stepfather
Much of Perry's work has an explicit sexual content. Some of his
sexual imagery has been described as "obscene
sadomasochistic sex scenes”. He also depicts
violence and child abuse. e.g. in
We've Found the Body of your
Child, 2000. In some work he combines sexual imagery with
representations of innocuous activities like classical music and
tennis. In other work he juxtaposes decorative clichés like flowers
with weapons and war. Perry combines various techniques as a
“guerrilla tactic”, using the humble and approachable medium of
pottery to provoke thought.
As well as ceramics, Perry has worked in printmaking, drawing,
embroidery and other textile work, film and performance. He has
written a
graphic novel,
Cycle of
Violence.
Perry frequently appears in public dressed as a woman and he has
described his female alter-ego variously as “a 19th century
reforming matriarch, a middle-England protester for
No More
Art, an aero-model-maker, or an Eastern European Freedom
Fighter,” and “a fortysomething woman living in a
Barret home, the kind of woman who eats
ready meals and can just about sew on a button”. In his work Perry
includes pictures of himself in women's clothes, for example,
Mother of All Battles (1996) is a photograph of "Claire"
holding a gun and wearing a dress, in ethnic eastern European
style, embroidered with images of war, exhibited at his 2002
Stedelijk show.
One critic has called Perry “The social critic from hell”.
Appeared on the
BBC's
Have I Got News for You series 38
episode 2, BBC Two, 9:30pm Saturday 24 October 2009 in
cross-dress.
References
- Buck, Louisa. The Personal Political Pots of Grayson
Perry
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